BACKGROUND

With the assistance of digital pen and paper technology in the field of prehospital data reporting, it seems to be possible to fulfill the requirements of "documentation" as well as the requirements of "quality management". The aim of this study was to determine the "primary documentation quality" (PDQ) of a data reporting system based on digital pen and paper technology (so-called DINO) within a helicopter emergency medical service (HEMS) over a 6-month period.

RESULTS

The PDQ is defined as the proportion of prehospital documented data, which is primarily recorded correctly by the data reporting system. For the national uniform core dataset (so-called MIND2) the PDQ was 96.7%, for "checkbox" and "numeric data fields" the PDQ was 99.8% and 93.6%, respectively and for "vital data" the PDQ was 96.7% [heart rate (HF), measurement of blood pressure] and 84.1% [peripheral oxygen saturation (S(p)O2), end tidal carbon dioxide concentration (etCO2), oxygen administration (O2)]. For "measurements" the PDQ was 96.9% (time stamps) and 86.9% (time frames), for "drugs" the PDQ was 43.6% (drug name) and 69.8% (drug dosage) and for"placement of infusion" 42% (infusion name) and 85.3% (infusion time), respectively. The average time for the "verification process" after mission completion was 1.5+/-0.4 min/mission.

CONCLUSIONS

The "primary documentation quality" of prehospital mission data reporting with the assistance of a digital pen and paper based documentation system (DINO) has been shown to completely fulfill the requirements of rapid and safe data documentation in actual missions, even at this early stage of development.